School holidays are coming to an end, and my bank balance has definitely taken a battering. This led to a family conversation when, like the old codger I am, I talked about how relatively little we had to spend money on when I was a kid.
No smart phones. No Netflix/Sky/Disney et al subscription packages. No Spotify. No cheap Shein deliveries. No Amazon. No JustEat or equivalent fast food deliveries. No internet. No iCloud. During the summer holidays I would happily go out with nothing more than a couple of quid in my pocket and when that ran out that was it.
What has this got to do with PR and marketing?
Well, it gives me the opportunity to segway into the amount of choice and options that abound when looking at growing your business. And just like all those £10, £15 subscriptions that get added to your monthly direct debit list (and more often than not forgotten), you can look at how many machine-gunning marketing activities you have signed up to, without really understanding what is or is not working.
The trouble is, as soon as you start researching the latest revolutionary marketing gig that is going to skyrocket sales, your online world is suddenly inundated with companies offering Rolls Royce results at bargain basement prices, feeding into a growing sense of FOMO – Fear of Missing Out. Are your competitors’ inboxes really being flooded with hundreds of qualified leads every single week? Do they really have queues of people desperate to buy their products? Beware the supercharged claims.
To cut through the noise and maintain your sanity you need to have a dogged determination to understand your own path based on your individual business needs, and direction. Holding firm against the snake oiled salesmen requires massive self belief, even in areas that you do not know or understand. This is where your own brand value comes in.
Your brand is more than just your logo – it is the very essence of who you are as a business and what you represent to your customers and stakeholders. A strong brand is powerful, and adds the weight of authority and reassurance to any marketing activity.
PR is an essential tool in the establishment of your brand. PR runs beneath a multitude of other more niche marketing activities, giving you the time and space to set out your values, provide evidence, explain what drives you as a business and the impact this has on your customer base, highlight what sets you above and beyond your competition.
Your brand is conveyed through the words you use, your tone of voice, your positioning in the market place. It is absolutely unique to you, and when done properly will make you immediately identifiable within a lineup of other ‘me too’ blands.
Once you are clear on your own brand identity, selecting additional results driven marketing activities become clearer. You have a much more laser focused sense of who you are, what you want to achieve, and how you want to achieve it, removing that sense of overwhelm.
There are some brilliant niche marketing services out there which, when applied properly, can bring in significant results. But often what works for a few weeks, can taper off and you end up playing (and paying) a game of WTF trying to work out what happened. Without substance, there is not sustenance.
When planning your marketing activities for the next few months, I suggest you lay down your splatter gun and take a long hard look at your foundational brand values. This might be the opportunity to build deep set authority which will carry your further, faster – rather than rapid fire fits and bursts which leave you depleted and lifeless.
